Some might know that there is currently a bug in vengeance formula that involves SotR and is particularly noticeable at lower levels where stats are much higher. Or, as some might say, smart use of game mechanics involving server side latency.

Basically, if you hit SotR at precisely the same time you get hit by a melee attack, the full damage goes through, but vengeance is calculated as if SotR was active. So if you have 99% damage reduction from mastery (I believe it is the cap), you will get 100x more vengeance from that attack than you were supposed to. At level 80 it is possible to stack a passive 70%+ mastery, so it is possible to solo most bosses ICC25HC, including Lich King.

Anyway, I suspect that it should work at any level of mastery, except the effect will be a lot less noticeable, of course. Do you think it might be worth using a boss swing timer addon and try to time SotR hits to increase vengeance, thus gaining more DPS/HPS?

Î was about to reply the same yesterday, but the bug described is that you take fulld amage, and vengeance is applied as if the full damage went through SotR (so full damage equals 1% damage in the 99& reduction) so vengeance is calculated from 100x full damage.

I am doubtful if this is actually the case as that would be some pretty backwards coding (using the mitigated value and then unmitigating it for vengeance calculation - it would be far less cody (says the non codeR) to calculate vengeance from the same base as the actual damage is calculated from - unmitigated damage, but it could be they bandaided it that way when the went from mitigsted damage to unmitigated damge for vengeance)

Right, what he's suggesting is that it's not that simple. Vengeance is supposed to be mitigation-agnostic. But instead of simply calculating it based on the boss's unmitigated damage, the linked thread is suggesting that it's reverse engineered from your damage taken and overall mitigation. I.e., if the boss hits for 100k, and you have 50% mitigation, you take 100*0.5=50k damage, and the game then calculates your Vengeance gain by dividing 50k by 0.5 again.

If that's true and it's affected by latency, then the situation described happens sort of like this: Boss hits you for 100k damage at the same time as you hit SotR with a bunch of mastery procs to bring you up to 90% mastery or more. You take damage as if SotR wasn't up, (let's ignore armor for the moment since it's multiplicative and cancels out), so you take the full 100k. Then the Vengeance calculation comes a split-second later, and gives you 100k/0.1=1000k. In other words, you're getting 10x the Vengeance AP that you should have from that attack. And if you can push mastery higher yet (99%), you can bump that by another order of magnitude.

I'm not sure if all of this is completely true, but it's very clear from the video that the Paladin jumps up from ~131k AP to 3 million AP at 2:28, while he has his character sheet open. He also has 88% mastery at this point, and it does look like it occurs almost simultaneously with a SotR cast. Unfortunately, his UI is confusing enough to me that I can't tell if he took much, if any, damage at that point - his health certainly didn't change much, but Sacred Shield probably absorbed it all, given that he had 131k AP to begin with.

But the numbers seem fishy too. Let's ignore the 131k AP before the spike, since that's mostly negligible here. We get 2% of the unmitigated damage from each attack over the last 20 seconds as Vengeance, so for one attack to bring us up to 3 million AP that attack needs to be worth 0.02*x=3m, or 150 million damage unmitigated. With the SotR bug, it only needs to be (1-mastery) of that, or 12%, giving 18 million unmitigated. That still seems too high. To get 3 million AP in the steady state while abusing this, you'd need to be taking 3000000*0.12/0.4=900k DPS before other mitigation effects (i.e. armor, which should be at most 75%, leaving a minimum of 225k DTPS). I don't think anything in HLK even hits that hard, as it would have been unhealable even with cooldowns.

Hm... looking at it more closely, he gets a Windsong proc and at least one other proc after opening the character sheet but before the big spike. Let's assume those are both mastery procs and take him to 99% SotR mitigation. That turns our 150 million damage into 1.5 million damage unmitigated, or at most 375k damage after 75% armor mitigation. Again, that still seems high - tanks had 50k-75k health in ICC, nothing hit anywhere remotely that hard. Even a Frenzied+Enraged horror only hit for around 150k.

That said, if SotR mitigation doesn't cap at 99%, then I could definitely see it happening. Boost that up to 99.9% mitigation and it only takes a 37.5k hit to give you that much AP.

The poster in the thread linked in the YouTube video suggests that it has to do with Sacred Shield somehow. It's not entirely clear to me how that gets included, but my best guess is that the game is calculating mitigation factor based on how much damage is actually taken after absorbs. That could explain the high AP gains: i.e. instead of just using 1-mastery, the game calculates mitigation based on (boss_unmit_damage)/(damage_actually_taken_after_absorbs). That would allow for the ~0.0025 factor required to push a ~375k unmitigated attack from a Frenzied+Enraged Shambling Horror up to 3 million. However, the same effect should also appear at level 90 in that case, which doesn't seem to happen - I frequently get full absorbs while doing dailies, and I've never seen my AP go much above 10k during that.

The person says even when he's way over 100% SotR DR, he still takes a bit of damage on each hit, so maybe there is just some preposterously small minimum, or maybe that overflow above 100% is factoring into the calculation somehow.

The person says even when he's way over 100% SotR DR, he still takes a bit of damage on each hit, so maybe there is just some preposterously small minimum, or maybe that overflow above 100% is factoring into the calculation somehow.

Apparently there is a 99% cap on it. At least I still take 100-500 damage from every hit.

He also has 88% mastery at this point, and it does look like it occurs almost simultaneously with a SotR cast.

I think you forgot that SotR has 30% base damage reduction, so 88% mastery would make it 118%.

The poster in the thread linked in the YouTube video suggests that it has to do with Sacred Shield somehow.

Nope, same thing is happening without sacred shield at all. Though with some testing on level 93 bosses (that hit a ton harder than anything you'd find in ICC), I only seem to get about 2-2.5 mil vengeance at most, which makes me very confused about how it is calculated.

But the numbers seem fishy too. Let's ignore the 131k AP before the spike, since that's mostly negligible here. We get 2% of the unmitigated damage from each attack over the last 20 seconds as Vengeance, so for one attack to bring us up to 3 million AP that attack needs to be worth 0.02*x=3m, or 150 million damage unmitigated. With the SotR bug, it only needs to be (1-mastery) of that, or 12%, giving 18 million unmitigated. That still seems too high. To get 3 million AP in the steady state while abusing this, you'd need to be taking 3000000*0.12/0.4=900k DPS before other mitigation effects (i.e. armor, which should be at most 75%, leaving a minimum of 225k DTPS). I don't think anything in HLK even hits that hard, as it would have been unhealable even with cooldowns.

Another thing you're forgetting is that they have a mechanic for smoothing out vengeance numbers. I believe it goes like this - if you get hit really hard, the formula averages out the damage you took from that attack and gives you half the vengeance for it. For melee attacks, enemy attack speed is used, and for special attacks a 60 second cooldown is implied (as per blue post; prior to this change it was 1.5 seconds for all attacks and was abused on bosses like h-kings where you would soak annihilation with cooldowns and proceed to annihilate the boss). On HLK, enraged shambling horrors are what causes the biggest AP spikes.

He also has 88% mastery at this point, and it does look like it occurs almost simultaneously with a SotR cast.

I think you forgot that SotR has 30% base damage reduction, so 88% mastery would make it 118%.

You're right, I was ignoring the base 30%.

But the numbers seem fishy too. Let's ignore the 131k AP before the spike, since that's mostly negligible here. We get 2% of the unmitigated damage from each attack over the last 20 seconds as Vengeance, so for one attack to bring us up to 3 million AP that attack needs to be worth 0.02*x=3m, or 150 million damage unmitigated. With the SotR bug, it only needs to be (1-mastery) of that, or 12%, giving 18 million unmitigated. That still seems too high. To get 3 million AP in the steady state while abusing this, you'd need to be taking 3000000*0.12/0.4=900k DPS before other mitigation effects (i.e. armor, which should be at most 75%, leaving a minimum of 225k DTPS). I don't think anything in HLK even hits that hard, as it would have been unhealable even with cooldowns.

Another thing you're forgetting is that they have a mechanic for smoothing out vengeance numbers. I believe it goes like this - if you get hit really hard, the formula averages out the damage you took from that attack and gives you half the vengeance for it. For melee attacks, enemy attack speed is used, and for special attacks a 60 second cooldown is implied (as per blue post; prior to this change it was 1.5 seconds for all attacks and was abused on bosses like h-kings where you would soak annihilation with cooldowns and proceed to annihilate the boss). On HLK, enraged shambling horrors are what causes the biggest AP spikes.

It's not really a "smoothing" mechanic. What you're describing is the ramp-up changes, summarized here. Basically, it tries to make sure that on each attack, you're at least brought up to 50% of the expected steady-state value. For example, if you take a 500k melee attack from a boss with a 1.5-second swing timer, the expected steady-state vengeance value is 40% of 500k/1.5, or 133k. Thus, if you're not already at half of that value, it will automatically bring you up to half of it (so 67k). This is the improved ramping mechanism at work - in the original version, that 500k melee attack would only give you 0.02*500k=10k Vengeance if you were starting from zero.

Otherwise, the calculation is still as described by the blues:Vengeance = 0.02*DamageOfMeleeAttack + OldVengeance*OldVengeanceTimeRemaining/20

The only difference is that if DamageOfMeleeAttack is high enough, it'll trigger the ramp-up mechanic and grant you a lot of Vengeance. I think you're correct that this is what's happening here. Let's assume that's the case - if so, the 3 million AP granted is 50% of the expected steady-state Vengeance value from that attack. Thus, the expected steady-state is 6 million Vengeance AP, or 15 million steady-state DTPS (before mitigation). If we assume the Frenzied horror attacks every second (rough guess), then each attack would still have to be about 15 million damage before mitigation.

Of course, with the SotR bug, that would drop it to a small percentage of that amount. If SotR mitigation is really capped at 99%, then it would take 1% of that, or only 150k per attack. Which is well within the pre-mitigation damage range of a Frenzied Shambling Horror.

My friend made some attempts on zorlok on his 80 paladin (blizzard broke level requirement for raids somehow) and only got about 2kk vengeance, even though the boss hits for 250-300k. I haven't managed to proc it myself from the few tries I did, but that does seem to indicate that something else is going on.

Also, it is probably bossible to get increased vengeance from more than one hit at a time, as could be the case on HLK with so many adds hitting you - that could also explain the 4kk spikes.

As of today, according to this post on MMOC Vengeance is capped at your maximum health as a band-aid fix until they can work out a more elegant solution to low-level players gaining such a huge amount of Vengeance. Can't find official blue confirmation as yet, but will probably surface in the next 24 hours or so.